Outreach.io isn’t for everybody.
Common complaints include poor customer support, difficulties exporting data, and a confusing dashboard.
There’s also the issue of cost. It’s not exactly cheap.
If you’re looking for an alternative, we’ve reviewed ten of the best outbound sales solutions.
Outreach is an end-to-end sales engagement platform for cold outreach, forecasting, and reporting. Outreach does get a lot of things right, especially for enterprise and mid-size companies.
One area where Outreach excels is multi-channel outreach. If you’re planning on implementing a fully omnichannel campaign, there are few other platforms that offer the same reach.
Outreach’s sequences cover the following channels:
Research from RAIN Group found that even top-performing sales teams require five touchpoints to inspire a response. And multi-channel outreach during the follow-up stage makes the number easier to hit.
No matter how many channels you activate, Outreach provides an overview of where leads are in the pipeline. It unifies lead tracking and tells you how close you are to securing a deal.
Outreach provides extensive automation features that speed up repetitive tasks. If you rely on junior SDRs to crank out carbon-copy communications, Outreach will spare their time—and fingers.
Outreach streamlines the following parts of the sales process:
When a prospect moves along the pipeline, Outreach triggers alerts, prompting sales reps to step in.
These features structure your pipeline, ensuring you never miss an opportunity due to a busy schedule or disorganization. This unified view also gives managers a clear overview of SDRs' actions.
Outreach offers the following AI features:
These features allow you to focus on human tasks while the AI tailors the outreach process to each prospect.
Outreach’s virtual assistant, Kaia, also supports meetings and calls by:
These tools add another layer of insight about client needs and pain points. Specifically, it sets you up for effective follow-up messages and calls, helping you close deals.
Outreach provides the following features that are hard to find in other solutions:
Maybe Outreach worked for you once but doesn't now. Or you tested the platform but failed to surmount the challenging onboarding.
Regardless, you wouldn’t be here if everything was fine and dandy.
Let’s look at why Outreach doesn’t work for every team.
Compared to other tools, Outreach puts a bigger dent in your budget. Even smaller teams could easily spend over $500 per month.
That could be manageable on a flexible, rolling contract. But Outreach pushes annual contracts, forcing you to gamble.
Some onboarding hiccups are expected with any platform, but Outreach is incredibly complex, and many users get stuck in Groundhog Day. It’s especially demanding for small businesses that lack technical expertise.
At this price point, you’d expect a tool to function perfectly. However, the interface is full of obstacles.
Even when it’s up and running, Outreach’s interface can halt progress. Sales reps report wasting time staring at loading screens or managing app crashes.
There have also been issues with data vanishing when connecting with platforms like Salesforce, causing automation issues.
Reviews of customer support are mixed. The support team often disappears, especially when there’s a thorny request—such as a refund.
When they do respond, customer service agents often share irrelevant answers or fail to take a proactive approach. For salespeople wanting to master the platform, it’s a disappointing discovery.
Now that we’ve covered the pros and cons, let’s look at alternative platforms.
Artisan is an AI sales outreach and engagement tool. Like Outreach, it supports multi-channel campaigns and offers a suite of automation features.
The difference is that Artisan emphasizes support, offering guided onboarding and attentive customer agents.
Furthermore, the core feature, AI BDR Ava, handles personalization, email warmup, delivery, and follow-ups. This is an AI-first approach, and the tool manages all of the early stages of the outbound sales workflow.
Artisan’s database, which contains over 300 million prospects, follows strict data hygiene protocols and is continuously enriched. In addition, Ava optimizes her approach over time through A/B testing and real-time reporting.
Key features:
Pricing:
Artisan adjusts its offering to fit your team. Contact the sales team for pricing.
MixMax is a sales engagement tool primarily for email campaigns. Its Chrome extension works on top of your email interface, reducing time spent yo-yoing between platforms.
Unlike Outreach, MixMax prioritizes the user experience and a quick setup process. With this plug-and-play tool, you won’t need to call user support every other day.
MixMax provides a wide range of tools for sales email sequences. Its automation features include scheduling, alerts, and personalization, which are supported by MixMax AI.
While MixMax isn’t an advanced multi-channel solution like Outreach, it offers flexible pricing and a good set of features.
Key features:
Pricing:
MixMax offers five pricing plans. The free plan provides basic email support. The SMB plan starts at $29 per user per month. Growth is $49 per user per month. Adding the CRM costs $69 per user per month. Contact the sales team for enterprise pricing.
Salesloft is a comprehensive sales tool for prospecting, outreach automation, message personalization, and reporting. It supports multi-channel campaigns across email, LinkedIn, and phone calls.
Salesloft also syncs data across devices, so you can pick up where you left off and collaborate effortlessly. The simple dashboard allows managers to oversee their team, set tasks, and track activity.
Like Outreach, Salesloft best suits large teams. Unfortunately, some of the downsides also match: it’s complex and takes time to onboard.
Key features:
Pricing:
Salesloft only offers Advanced and Premier tiers. Contact the sales team for pricing.
Groove is a sales engagement and prospecting tool by Clari that aims to increase sales teams’ efficiency. Like Outreach, it supports multi-channel campaigns across email, phone, SMS, and LinkedIn. It also syncs your email, calendar, and CRM, unifying your workflow.
If you were overwhelmed by Outreach, this tool may be a good fit. It’s more manageable for small and mid-sized teams while still offering a selection of tracking and automation tools. Plus, it integrates smoothly with Salesforce.
Unfortunately, the interface can be buggy, and some features, such as the email templates, are confusing.
Key features:
Pricing:
Contact the sales team for pricing.
Freshsales is a sales CRM created by Freshworks, an AI solution provider. It automates outreach.
The AI assistant Freddy is a key feature. “He” handles all outreach, including lead discovery, qualification, and tracking.
The user interface is simple, including kanban views with drag-and-drop cards. It’s a good choice if Outreach’s complexity and clunky interface put you off.
Key features:
Pricing:
Billed monthly, the Growth Plan is $11 per user per month. Pro is for enterprise businesses and starts at $47 per user per month. Enterprise costs $71 per user per month.
QuickMail is an omnichannel outreach tool focusing on email campaigns. It keeps messages out of the spam folder with AI domain health monitoring.
QuickMail also automates outbound sales workflows and uses AI to create complete emails from prompts. The strong analytics suite covers a range of prospect behavior.
The tool is user-friendly with excellent customer support. However, there is still a steep learning curve. It is a more cost-effective alternative to Outreach with better customer reviews.
Key features:
Pricing:
QuickMail’s Basic Plan costs $49 per month, the Pro Plan costs $89 per month, and the Expert Plan comes in at $129 per month.
Mailshake streamlines outreach across social media, phone, and email. It also provides tools for PR, link building, and HR. The boldly named "Shakespeare AI” automates message composition with templates and customizable cadences.
Mailshake is a targeted solution. It does email well. But if you’re searching for the comprehensiveness of Outreach without the downsides, Mailshake isn’t the answer.
Key features:
Pricing:
Contact the sales team for pricing.
Reply is an all-in-one platform that closely matches Outreach. If you’re looking for a more cost-effective, entry-level tool, this isn’t it. However, if you’re looking for extensive functionality, it’s worth considering.
The multichannel outreach platform supports email, SMS, WhatsApp, and phone calls. AI customizes and automates message sequences at scale. Reply’s lead database also includes more than 140 million entries.
Reply offers more features for the price than Outreach. In addition, it's more user-friendly. However, it takes time to set up, and the lower-priced tiers lack multi-channel features.
Key features:
Pricing:
The Email Volume Plan begins at $49 per user per month but lacks advanced automation. The Multichannel Plan starts at $89 per user per month, and the Agency Plan starts at $166 per month.
The most advanced plan is the AI SDR Plan, which starts at $259 per month and includes all multi-channel capabilities.
Yesware is a sales engagement tool that integrates with most email providers. It’s a good fit for BDRs who prioritize email outreach.
Yesware offers email templates and customization. However, they are relatively basic. Don’t expect to include attachments or videos at scale.
The integrations and reporting also lack sophistication. While this tool won’t strain your budget like Outreach, it enforces tracking limits.
If you found Outreach overly complex and don’t require advanced functionality, sizing down to Yesware could be a yes. It’s easy to set up and user-friendly.
Key features:
Pricing:
Billed monthly, the Pro tier costs $19 per user. Premium is $45 per user, and Enterprise is $65. Yesware offers a two-week free trial and custom pricing for more complex requirements.
Lemlist supports multi-channel campaigns across email, LinkedIn, and cold calling.
It solves deliverability challenges with advanced warm-up and domain reputation features that copy human behavior. In addition, you can set team limits to avoid restrictions.
Lemlist offers easy-to-personalize templates and data snippets. Its database contains over 450 million prospects, and you can develop lead lists using search filters or on LinkedIn via its Chrome extension.
Key features:
Pricing:
Billed monthly, the Email Starter is $39 per month per user. Email Pro is $69 per month per user, which better suits experienced teams. The Multi-Channel Expert tier is $99 per month per user. Outreach Scale costs $159 per user. For larger teams, custom pricing is available.
Outreach is an advanced tool, but its complexity, tricky interface, and poor customer support put many teams off.
If you prefer a simple tool that’s easier to use, Yesware and Mailshake are good options. If you require advanced features alongside better support, training, and functionality, Reply.io is well worth trialing.
For advanced AI features and full automation? Artisan, with its AI BDR Ava, is virtually impossible to compete with.
Skip the manual work and let Artisan’s Ava handle your cold outreach—from lead sourcing to hyper-personalized emails. Contact Artisan to see what Ava can do for your pipeline and start closing more deals, faster.
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Irina is a Founder at ONSAAS, Growth Lead at Aura, and a SaaS marketing consultant. She helps companies to grow their revenue with SEO and inbound marketing. In her spare time, Irina entertains her cat Persie and collects airline miles.
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